“He Ended up Like a Merguez Sausage”. Trauma in a French High Security Prison.

Martine Herzog-Evans (1) , Jérôme Thomas (2)

1 CEJESCO - Centre d'études juridiques sur l'efficacité des systèmes continentaux - EA 4693
2 CEREP - Centre d'Etude et de Recherche sur les Emplois et la Professionnalisation - EA 4692

Prison officers'(PO) trauma has been addressed by the literature, but little is known about their experience in the French context. As part of a broader study, we were asked to document the experience of the correctional staff working in a historical high security prison set in a 900-year-old former monastery. Using appreciative inquiry, we conducted 27 interviews and found that most of the interviewees had been repeatedly subjected to trauma. There was also a patent intergenerational transmission of trauma, which both increased its impact and served as a coping mechanism. We additionally found that rurality further helped POs cope with trauma by facilitating a cutoff between prison and their normal life in the form of sports or rural activities.

Mots clés: correctional officers; high-security prisons; intergenerational transmission of trauma; prison; prison officers; rural prisons; stress; trauma Gefängnis; generationsübergreifende Weitergabe von Traumata; Hochsicherheitsgefängnis; Justizvollzugsbeamte; ländliche Gefängnisse; Strafvollzugsbedienstete; Stress; Trauma

Domaines: Sciences de l'Homme et Société; Sociologie; Psychologie

Martine Herzog-Evans, Jérôme Thomas. “He Ended up Like a Merguez Sausage”. Trauma in a French High Security Prison.. KrimOJ Kriminologie - Das Online-Journal | Criminology - The Online Journal, 2021, 3 (3), pp.180-197. ⟨10.18716/ojs/krimoj/2021.3.1⟩. ⟨hal-03359267⟩